Forsaken Skies (33 page)

“What does that mean?” Lanoe asked.

“They build the landers here, stuff them in these modules—so they can ship them someplace else. Back to the fleet, maybe. Or…Look, I don't want to speculate too much.”

“Go ahead,” Lanoe told her.

The engineer nodded. “Maybe they were going to ship these to Niraya. Maybe this is where they're assembling their invasion force.”

None of the pilots had anything to say to that.

Proserpina let the silence draw out for a moment before she went on. “This is manufacturing on a huge scale. Everything in this crater was designed to build those landers. Because it's all done by machines there's no need for any real infrastructure—no communications, no living quarters, no food or water supplies. Just factories. I couldn't even identify any purely defensive structures.”

Lanoe snorted. “They put up a damned good fight if that's the case.”

Proserpina shook her head. In the low gravity her hair swung around her cheeks in a way Maggs found decisively fetching. “I said purely defensive. From what you told me, you were opposed by a bunch of landers and workers that just slowed you down a little.”

“What about the antivehicle towers?” Zhang asked. “They nearly fried me.”

“Those weren't designed to shoot you down. Those were smelters—they used the high-temperature plasma to melt down the ore and burn out any impurities. They could be used as weapons by venting that plasma in your direction, but as weapons go they were incredibly inefficient. If they'd managed to kill you or drive you off, it still would have set them back by months to lose all that plasma.”

“Sure,” Lanoe said. “That's interesting. Moot now, though. My main question for you right now is who built this place.”

“Hard to say. There were no poly logos anywhere in the structures I saw. That's not how Centrocor operates—they put their hexagon logo everywhere they can.”

“So it was DaoLink?” Zhang asked.

“Well…” Proserpina chewed on her lip. “Maybe. I mean, I can't rule that out a hundred percent. But…I don't know. This technology, it just isn't something I've seen before. Machines building the machines to build more machines.”

“Some kind of new technology,” Zhang suggested. “Something they're testing out. It makes financial sense, right? If everything's done by machines then you don't need to pay any workers. I can definitely see a poly thinking that was a good idea. No salaries, no health care, no food costs, even.”

“Damned polys,” Valk said. “That's exactly their kind of thinking. And they know it's going to be unpopular, so they experiment with it out here, where nobody's looking. No logos because if something goes really wrong, then it can't be traced back to them. They don't care about people, they never have, why, back in the Crisis—”

“Enough Establishment rhetoric,” Maggs said.

Valk turned to stare at him—at least, Maggs assumed that was what he was doing. Faceless bastard.

“Why attack Niraya, though? If they had what they needed out here on Aruna, why send that lander to kill the farmers?”

“If this is new technology the polys have created,” Zhang pointed out, “maybe they sent it here to test it.”

Proserpina threw her hands up and shouted, “Enough! If you can stop hypothesizing for a second, I have more to say. You dragged me all the way out here; the least you can do is actually hear me out.”

“Sure,” Lanoe told her. The others nodded. Maggs gave her one of the warmer smiles in his stock.

“Thank you,” she said. She bent over the controls of the display and brought up some new images. Tomographic cross sections and millimeter-wave deep scans of the machinery they'd found in the factory.

“Everywhere we went in the crater, I could figure out what this stuff did pretty easily. Nothing here was designed to be pretty, or user-friendly, or anything like that. It's basic machinery, designed to work and nothing else. That made it easy for me to see exactly what everything did, and how it was done. Except there were a couple of places where I looked at a machine and it was just…wrong.”

“Wrong how?” Zhang asked.

“I don't want to get technical here, but there are some basic principles of engineering, some really bedrock stuff, that don't appear anywhere in the crater. No wheels, for instance.”

“What do you mean?” Lanoe asked her.

“I mean nothing in this crater has wheels. It all has legs instead. Here.” She adjusted the display. “You see this line, this was a main route from the pit mine to the nearest smelter. All the ore they dug up had to be carried along this line. It's a road, a good, flat, gently graded road that makes perfect sense. But there are no trucks on that road, no trains. Every piece of ore was carried from pit to smelter by a worker with a bunch of legs. That makes
no
sense. It shows up in the factory, too. There's no assembly line in there, because that would mean conveyor belts, and a conveyor belt is just a fancy application of the wheel.”

“I don't understand,” Zhang said.

“Whoever designed this facility,” Proserpina told them, “didn't want to use wheels. Or didn't know how.”

The pilots stared at each other, and it was clear to Maggs they weren't getting it.

He'd already twigged to where this was going, though.

And he quietly, if secretly, approved.

“The funny thing is, there are rotary elements all over the place. Centrifuges, pulleys, lots of things. But no wheels at all. Just legs.”

Lanoe nodded. “That does seem strange,” he said.

Proserpina sighed. “Look. If this is the polys…there had to be some human involved, somewhere. The machines build the machines all the way down, fine, but there had to be a prime mover, a human engineer who designed the first machine. And I guarantee that engineer would know about wheels. This only makes sense if that first engineer had no idea what a wheel was, like maybe they grew up in space or they evolved on an ocean planet or a gas giant with no surface—”

“You're saying the machines weren't designed by a poly engineer,” Zhang said, very carefully.

“I'm saying they weren't designed by a human engineer,” Proserpina replied. Clearly she knew she was fighting an uphill battle. Her stance changed, her shoulders coming forward, her head back. As if to fend off a blow.

She let them all stand—or recline, in Maggs's case—there in silence while the import of her words sank in.

“It's time,” she said, eventually, “to talk very seriously about aliens.”

It was cold in the dome at the base of the Retreat. The air didn't move but it sucked the heat right out of him. The flagstones were hard on his knees where he knelt on the floor.

Thom had never prayed. His father had thought religion was for the feeble-minded, and Thom had grown up thinking only the things of the material world mattered. He didn't pray now, either, but instead he turned his thoughts toward Lanoe, so far away.

I've let you down. You risked so much to save me,
he thought
. You shouldn't have. You should have let me die in Geryon. Rather than just delaying the inevitable.

Warm hands on his shoulders. A soft voice in his ear calling his name. He lifted his head and looked behind him and Roan was there. He could see in her face that she was worried for him, that she could see how much he hurt.

She knelt down beside him. “The first elders, the pioneers who were the first people to live on Niraya, all lived inside this dome,” she said, as if she were a tour guide filling him in on local folklore. He didn't mind. It was a break from being stuck with his own dark thoughts. “There was no breathable air outside at all. They lived in here with some animals and a lot of plants. They studied and meditated and worked tirelessly. They died in here.”

“They were that desperate to get away from the rest of humanity?” he asked.

“They
believed,
” she said. “They believed that this planet could mean something. Look up.”

The dome itself was made of steel girders framing hundreds of triangular panels, each a meter or so on a side. “That used to be glass up there,” Roan said. The panels between the supports had been plastered over long since. Each section had been painted, though each one, it seemed, in a different style or color palette. A few of them were blank. “Every time an aspirant becomes an elder,” Roan said, her voice hushed with reverence, “they paint one of those.”

Thom studied the panels, though there were so many and they were all so different none of them really stood out. He saw one that showed a figure in an old-fashioned baggy space suit standing at the rim of a canyon. Another was a pattern of concentric circles, each densely figured with the shapes of tiny human embryos. Some were just swatches of color, deep rich blues or simple, pure yellows.

“Look, do you see that one? It's always been one of my favorites,” she told him. He followed her finger to see where she was pointing. The panel was barely touched, its plaster unpainted except that in the middle of the space, in simple lettering, was written the legend
IT WILL BE GREEN
.

“You're going to paint one of those, someday,” he told her.

But she shook off his assumption. “Not every aspirant makes it to elderhood. It's a hard road and it's not for everybody.” She looked more wistful than disheartened by the prospect. “I've been studying to be a planetary engineer,” she told him. “I've learned all about how you can change a planet, change its chemistry at the most basic levels, to make it more livable. How you can drop comets on a planet to give it more water, and what plants are best for generating oxygen. I always knew, though, that no matter how hard I worked or how much of my life I gave to it, I wouldn't live to see Niraya turn green. The elder who painted that panel,” she said, “knew the same thing. But he or she kept working. They kept working because they believed in the future.”

He reached over and took her hand. She stared down at it for a moment, and he saw her mouth fall, saw her shoulders slump. He thought maybe she was going to pull away. He was—attracted to her. Maybe that was the wrong word for it. He was drawn to her. She was his only friend on this planet, the only person who'd shown him any sympathy. Of course he was going to develop feelings for her.

That didn't mean she would feel the same way, though. It didn't mean she would feel anything. He loosened his fingers, in case she wanted to pull her hand back. She didn't, though. She just left her hand in his, let it be.

He drew so much comfort from the touch, so much peace. He almost didn't want to break the spell and end that moment. He had to tell her something, though. Truth was important to her. Honesty. He had to tell her what he'd discovered.

“Elder McRae thinks Lanoe will fail,” Thom said.

Roan nodded. “I heard the two of you talking. I know you disagree with her, though.”

Thom wasn't sure if that was true, anymore, but he said nothing.

“Can I show you something?” she asked.

“Aliens,” Lanoe said.

Maggs considered himself a bit of an expert of reading people. He had made quite the study of the way a person's tone of voice could give them away, even when they said the most mundane of things.

In this case, he determined that Lanoe a) had dismissed the idea before as not worth thinking about; b) was now still very uncomfortable with the idea; and c) very much wanted someone else to scoff at the idea and tell him it was nonsense. From which one could draw the inescapable conclusion that he d) was starting to believe it.

Normally Maggs would have been happy to squash the idea. It was after all preposterous—when the smoke cleared, it would be revealed that this was all some new black project run by the polys, that there was a perfectly logical solution without the need for resorting to fairy tales and the supernatural.

Just then, however, Lanoe believing in little gray men served his purpose.